The essays in this volume explore the lives and activities of people of African descent – both black and white - in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. They go ...
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The essays in this volume explore the lives and activities of people of African descent – both black and white - in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. They go beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic emphasis of Black Studies, examining the experiences of Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. Their subjects include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among ‘Africans’, and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the ‘colour line’ and testing the limits of solidarity. The authors focus on the ways in which their subjects have used the skills and resources they brought with them and the ones they found in each place of arrival to construct themselves and their families as subjects of their own lives, and also what new visions of self and community (or politics) have been enabled by the crossing of borders. The volume is multidisciplinary, and the contributors include a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.Less

Africa in Europe : Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century

Published in print: 2013-02-15

The essays in this volume explore the lives and activities of people of African descent – both black and white - in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. They go beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic emphasis of Black Studies, examining the experiences of Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. Their subjects include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among ‘Africans’, and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the ‘colour line’ and testing the limits of solidarity. The authors focus on the ways in which their subjects have used the skills and resources they brought with them and the ones they found in each place of arrival to construct themselves and their families as subjects of their own lives, and also what new visions of self and community (or politics) have been enabled by the crossing of borders. The volume is multidisciplinary, and the contributors include a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.

The Haitian Revolution has generated responses from commentators in fields ranging from philosophy to historiography to twentieth-century literary and artistic studies. But what about the written ...
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The Haitian Revolution has generated responses from commentators in fields ranging from philosophy to historiography to twentieth-century literary and artistic studies. But what about the written work produced at the time, by Haitians? This book presents an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Revolutionary era. It shows the emergence of two strands of textual innovation, both evolving from the new revolutionary consciousness: the political texts produced by Haitian revolutionary leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines; and popular Creole poetry from anonymous courtesans in Saint-Domingue's libertine culture. These textual forms, though they differ from each other, demonstrate both the increasing cultural autonomy and the literary voice of non-white populations in the colony at the time of revolution. Unschooled generals and courtesans, long presented as voiceless, are revealed to be legitimate speakers and authors. These Haitian French and Creole texts have been neglected as a foundation of Afro-diasporic literature by former slaves in the Atlantic world for two reasons: they do not fit the generic criteria of the slave narrative (which is rooted in the autobiographical experience of enslavement); and they are mediated texts, relayed to the print-cultural Atlantic domain not by the speakers themselves, but by secretaries or refugee colonists. These texts challenge how we think about authorial voice, writing, print culture, and cultural autonomy in the context of the formerly enslaved, and demand that we reassess our historical understanding of the Haitian Independence and its relationship to an international world of contemporary readers.Less

Beyond the Slave Narrative : Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution

Deborah Jenson

Published in print: 2011-02-08

The Haitian Revolution has generated responses from commentators in fields ranging from philosophy to historiography to twentieth-century literary and artistic studies. But what about the written work produced at the time, by Haitians? This book presents an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Revolutionary era. It shows the emergence of two strands of textual innovation, both evolving from the new revolutionary consciousness: the political texts produced by Haitian revolutionary leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines; and popular Creole poetry from anonymous courtesans in Saint-Domingue's libertine culture. These textual forms, though they differ from each other, demonstrate both the increasing cultural autonomy and the literary voice of non-white populations in the colony at the time of revolution. Unschooled generals and courtesans, long presented as voiceless, are revealed to be legitimate speakers and authors. These Haitian French and Creole texts have been neglected as a foundation of Afro-diasporic literature by former slaves in the Atlantic world for two reasons: they do not fit the generic criteria of the slave narrative (which is rooted in the autobiographical experience of enslavement); and they are mediated texts, relayed to the print-cultural Atlantic domain not by the speakers themselves, but by secretaries or refugee colonists. These texts challenge how we think about authorial voice, writing, print culture, and cultural autonomy in the context of the formerly enslaved, and demand that we reassess our historical understanding of the Haitian Independence and its relationship to an international world of contemporary readers.

This book examines the events surrounding the establishment of a settlement in West Africa in 1787 that was later to become Freetown, the present-day capital of Sierra Leone. It outlines the range of ...
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This book examines the events surrounding the establishment of a settlement in West Africa in 1787 that was later to become Freetown, the present-day capital of Sierra Leone. It outlines the range of ideas and attitudes to Africa that underlay the foundation of the settlement, and the part played by the black settlers themselves, London's ‘Black Poor’. Was the settlement based on a racist deportation designed to keep Britain white (as some accounts claim), or a voluntary emigration in which blacks themselves played a part? Once in West Africa, the settlers faced a struggle to survive against often harsh conditions, a struggle that included conflict with slave traders and neighbouring Africans. The settlement's ‘failure’ is perhaps less surprising than its subsequent re-establishment. The last part of the book looks at the nature of the Sierra Leone Company through the debate over its formation.Less

Stephen J. Braidwood

Published in print: 1994-06-01

This book examines the events surrounding the establishment of a settlement in West Africa in 1787 that was later to become Freetown, the present-day capital of Sierra Leone. It outlines the range of ideas and attitudes to Africa that underlay the foundation of the settlement, and the part played by the black settlers themselves, London's ‘Black Poor’. Was the settlement based on a racist deportation designed to keep Britain white (as some accounts claim), or a voluntary emigration in which blacks themselves played a part? Once in West Africa, the settlers faced a struggle to survive against often harsh conditions, a struggle that included conflict with slave traders and neighbouring Africans. The settlement's ‘failure’ is perhaps less surprising than its subsequent re-establishment. The last part of the book looks at the nature of the Sierra Leone Company through the debate over its formation.

This critical edition offers the first English translation of Baron de Vastey’s Le système colonial dévoilé, a trailblazing critique of colonialism and the transatlantic slave system that was ...
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This critical edition offers the first English translation of Baron de Vastey’s Le système colonial dévoilé, a trailblazing critique of colonialism and the transatlantic slave system that was originally published in Haiti in 1814. Jean-Louis Vastey was the best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after that country’s world-historical revolution (1791-1804). Born in 1781, Vastey was the son of a white plantation owner and a free woman of color; by the time of his murder in 1820, he had authored over ten books and pamphlets, and had become one of the most influential members of the government of King Henry Christophe. His first and most incendiary work, Colonial System Unveiled, provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, as well as an unrelenting denunciation of racial hierarchies and colonial rule that anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre. Featuring an extensive Introduction and critical apparatus that provides historical and ideological contextualization for Vastey’s book, this edition also includes four supplementary essays on Colonial System written by scholars on the cutting edge of Haitian Revolutionary Studies.Less

The Colonial System Unveiled

Baron de Vastey

Published in print: 2014-09-01

This critical edition offers the first English translation of Baron de Vastey’s Le système colonial dévoilé, a trailblazing critique of colonialism and the transatlantic slave system that was originally published in Haiti in 1814. Jean-Louis Vastey was the best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after that country’s world-historical revolution (1791-1804). Born in 1781, Vastey was the son of a white plantation owner and a free woman of color; by the time of his murder in 1820, he had authored over ten books and pamphlets, and had become one of the most influential members of the government of King Henry Christophe. His first and most incendiary work, Colonial System Unveiled, provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, as well as an unrelenting denunciation of racial hierarchies and colonial rule that anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre. Featuring an extensive Introduction and critical apparatus that provides historical and ideological contextualization for Vastey’s book, this edition also includes four supplementary essays on Colonial System written by scholars on the cutting edge of Haitian Revolutionary Studies.

Colonialism created exclusive economic and segregatory social spaces for the exploitation and management of natural and human resources, in the form of plantations, ports, mining towns, hill ...
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Colonialism created exclusive economic and segregatory social spaces for the exploitation and management of natural and human resources, in the form of plantations, ports, mining towns, hill stations, civil lines, and new urban centres for Europeans. This book studies the social history of medicine within two intersecting enclaves in colonial India: the hill-station of Darjeeling, which incorporated the sanitarian and racial norms of the British Raj; and in the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal, which produced tea for the global market. It explores the demographic and environmental transformation of the region; the racialisation of urban spaces and its contestations; the establishment of hill sanatoria; the expansion of tea cultivation; labour emigration; and the paternalistic modes of healthcare in the plantation. The book also examines how the threat of epidemics and riots informed the conflictual relationship between the plantations and the adjacent agricultural villages and district towns. It reveals how tropical medicine was practised in its ‘field’; researches in malaria; how hookworm, dysentery, cholera, and leprosy were informed by investigations here; and how the exigencies of the colonial state, private entrepreneurship, and municipal governance subverted their implementation. The book establishes the vital link between medicine, the political economy, and the social history of colonialism, demonstrating that while enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of the articulation of colonial power and economy, they were not isolated sites. It shows that the critical aspect of the colonial enclaves was in their interconnectedness; with other enclaves, with the global economy, and with international medical research.Less

Contagion and Enclaves : Tropical Medicine in Colonial India

Nandini Bhattacharya

Published in print: 2012-11-20

Colonialism created exclusive economic and segregatory social spaces for the exploitation and management of natural and human resources, in the form of plantations, ports, mining towns, hill stations, civil lines, and new urban centres for Europeans. This book studies the social history of medicine within two intersecting enclaves in colonial India: the hill-station of Darjeeling, which incorporated the sanitarian and racial norms of the British Raj; and in the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal, which produced tea for the global market. It explores the demographic and environmental transformation of the region; the racialisation of urban spaces and its contestations; the establishment of hill sanatoria; the expansion of tea cultivation; labour emigration; and the paternalistic modes of healthcare in the plantation. The book also examines how the threat of epidemics and riots informed the conflictual relationship between the plantations and the adjacent agricultural villages and district towns. It reveals how tropical medicine was practised in its ‘field’; researches in malaria; how hookworm, dysentery, cholera, and leprosy were informed by investigations here; and how the exigencies of the colonial state, private entrepreneurship, and municipal governance subverted their implementation. The book establishes the vital link between medicine, the political economy, and the social history of colonialism, demonstrating that while enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of the articulation of colonial power and economy, they were not isolated sites. It shows that the critical aspect of the colonial enclaves was in their interconnectedness; with other enclaves, with the global economy, and with international medical research.

This book explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent conflict, and addresses ethical ...
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This book explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent conflict, and addresses ethical issues normally approached from within the discourses of law, the social sciences, and health sciences, through narrative analysis. It draws from and juxtaposes narratives of profoundly different kinds to make its point: fictional narratives, such as the work of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee; public testimony, such as that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Jacob Zuma's (the former Deputy President's) 2006 trial on charges of rape; and personal testimony, drawn from interviews undertaken by the author over the past ten years in South Africa. These narratives are analysed in order to demonstrate the different ways in which they illuminate the cultural ‘state of the nation’: ways that elude descriptions of South African subjects undertaken from within discourses which have a historical tendency to ignore cultural dimensions of lived experience and their material particularity. The implications of these lived experiences of culture are underlined by the book's focus on the violation of human rights as comprising practices that are simultaneously discursive and material. Cases of such violations, all drawn from the South African context, include humans' use of non-human animals as instruments of violence against other humans; the constructed marginalisation and vulnerability of women and children; and the practice of stigma in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.Less

Rosemary Jolly

Published in print: 2010-07-22

This book explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent conflict, and addresses ethical issues normally approached from within the discourses of law, the social sciences, and health sciences, through narrative analysis. It draws from and juxtaposes narratives of profoundly different kinds to make its point: fictional narratives, such as the work of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee; public testimony, such as that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Jacob Zuma's (the former Deputy President's) 2006 trial on charges of rape; and personal testimony, drawn from interviews undertaken by the author over the past ten years in South Africa. These narratives are analysed in order to demonstrate the different ways in which they illuminate the cultural ‘state of the nation’: ways that elude descriptions of South African subjects undertaken from within discourses which have a historical tendency to ignore cultural dimensions of lived experience and their material particularity. The implications of these lived experiences of culture are underlined by the book's focus on the violation of human rights as comprising practices that are simultaneously discursive and material. Cases of such violations, all drawn from the South African context, include humans' use of non-human animals as instruments of violence against other humans; the constructed marginalisation and vulnerability of women and children; and the practice of stigma in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

This book examines economic relations between Spain and Spanish America in the colonial period, and their implications for the economic structures of both parties from the beginning of Spanish ...
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This book examines economic relations between Spain and Spanish America in the colonial period, and their implications for the economic structures of both parties from the beginning of Spanish imperialism until the outbreak of the Spanish-American revolutions for independence. Originally published in Spanish in 1992, the text has been fully revised for this first English edition.Less

The Economic Aspects of Spanish Imperialism in America, 1492–1810

John Fisher

Published in print: 1998-10-01

This book examines economic relations between Spain and Spanish America in the colonial period, and their implications for the economic structures of both parties from the beginning of Spanish imperialism until the outbreak of the Spanish-American revolutions for independence. Originally published in Spanish in 1992, the text has been fully revised for this first English edition.

This book brings to life the unique contribution made by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. It examines French and Atlantic ...
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This book brings to life the unique contribution made by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. It examines French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years, when Haiti was menaced with the re-establishment of slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. The book offers readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in addition to which it calls attention to the lives and work of two lesser-known but important figures: Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin. Approaching these five women through the prism of paternal authority, the book explores the empathy that daughters show towards blacks as well as their resistance against the oppression exercised by male colonists and other authority figures. These works by French women antislavery writers bear significant similarities, which the book explores, with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Francophone texts, and allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender research in the colonial archive and the need to expand conceptions of French women's literature in the nineteenth century as being a small minority corpus. The book contributes to an understanding of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism, undercutting distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies, and between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Francophone writing.Less

Doris Y. Kadish

Published in print: 2012-10-17

This book brings to life the unique contribution made by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. It examines French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years, when Haiti was menaced with the re-establishment of slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. The book offers readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in addition to which it calls attention to the lives and work of two lesser-known but important figures: Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin. Approaching these five women through the prism of paternal authority, the book explores the empathy that daughters show towards blacks as well as their resistance against the oppression exercised by male colonists and other authority figures. These works by French women antislavery writers bear significant similarities, which the book explores, with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Francophone texts, and allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender research in the colonial archive and the need to expand conceptions of French women's literature in the nineteenth century as being a small minority corpus. The book contributes to an understanding of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism, undercutting distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies, and between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Francophone writing.

This book turns the postcolonial critical gaze that had previously been most likely to train itself on regions other than Europe, and sometimes those perceived to be most culturally or geographically ...
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This book turns the postcolonial critical gaze that had previously been most likely to train itself on regions other than Europe, and sometimes those perceived to be most culturally or geographically distant from Europe, back on Europe itself. It argues that racism is alive and dangerously well in Europe, and examines this racism through the lens of postcolonial criticism. Postcolonial racism can be a racism of reaction, based on the perceived threat to traditional social and cultural identities; or a racism of (false) respect, based on mainstream liberals' desire to hold at arm's length ‘different’ cultures they are anxious not to offend. Most of all, postcolonial racism, at least within the contemporary European context, is a racism of surveillance, whereby ‘foreigners’ become ‘aliens’, ‘protection’ disguises ‘preference’, and ‘cultural difference’ slides into ‘racial stigmatisation’ – all in the interests of representing the European people, which is a very different entity to the European population as a whole.Less

Racism Postcolonialism Europe

Published in print: 2009-10-15

This book turns the postcolonial critical gaze that had previously been most likely to train itself on regions other than Europe, and sometimes those perceived to be most culturally or geographically distant from Europe, back on Europe itself. It argues that racism is alive and dangerously well in Europe, and examines this racism through the lens of postcolonial criticism. Postcolonial racism can be a racism of reaction, based on the perceived threat to traditional social and cultural identities; or a racism of (false) respect, based on mainstream liberals' desire to hold at arm's length ‘different’ cultures they are anxious not to offend. Most of all, postcolonial racism, at least within the contemporary European context, is a racism of surveillance, whereby ‘foreigners’ become ‘aliens’, ‘protection’ disguises ‘preference’, and ‘cultural difference’ slides into ‘racial stigmatisation’ – all in the interests of representing the European people, which is a very different entity to the European population as a whole.

This book focuses on the range of trajectories followed by slavery as an institution since the various abolitions of the nineteenth century. It also considers the continuing and multi-faceted ...
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This book focuses on the range of trajectories followed by slavery as an institution since the various abolitions of the nineteenth century. It also considers the continuing and multi-faceted strategies that descendants of both owners and slaves have developed to make what use they can of their forebears' social positions, or to distance themselves from them. The book contains both anthropological and historical contributions that present empirical evidence on contemporary manifestations of slavery and related phenomena in Mauritania, Benin, Niger, Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, and the Gambia. As a whole, it advances a conceptual framework for understanding slavery in West Africa today: instead of retracing the end of West African slavery, the book highlights the preliminary contours of its recent reconfigurations.Less

Reconfiguring Slavery : West African Trajectories

Benedetta Rossi

Published in print: 2009-03-01

This book focuses on the range of trajectories followed by slavery as an institution since the various abolitions of the nineteenth century. It also considers the continuing and multi-faceted strategies that descendants of both owners and slaves have developed to make what use they can of their forebears' social positions, or to distance themselves from them. The book contains both anthropological and historical contributions that present empirical evidence on contemporary manifestations of slavery and related phenomena in Mauritania, Benin, Niger, Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, and the Gambia. As a whole, it advances a conceptual framework for understanding slavery in West Africa today: instead of retracing the end of West African slavery, the book highlights the preliminary contours of its recent reconfigurations.